by Sevenless » Wed Jun 22, 2022 11:07 am
I've done a bit of mucking around with this + observed my village's progress through a couple worlds now, and I have a theory on how it works: You aren't supposed to get everything alone. Combat instructions paved the way for the co-dependance even though I'm not sure which came first.
"Farming ants for chop" just doesn't seem to work (I've tried). There's probably some kind of reset involved eventually, but you get rapidly diminishing chances to loot any card from an animal the more you've killed. So you have a village of hunters spreading out and getting their discoveries, helping people get cards they haven't found yet via instructions. Those either don't count against the card diminishing returns, or you tend to grab them off easy an species you've already mulched 200x and it doesn't effectively matter. But whenever you start killing a new species, you get cards really quick at first. After you've killed for first 10-20 (random numbers, it's definitely under 50 though), your chances of getting extra moves off that species until the "reset" are effectively 0. But if you stop killing something (because it's shit to eat like badgers) and come back a month later you can grab a card again on your first kill pretty easily.
So the optimal strat is to have multiple hunters all sharing moves with each other to complete decks. Usually you need 3-4 people doing it to finish decks in a decent time frame (functional decks in <1 week, complete decks in <2 weeks? but it's been a while so I'm fuzzy on that).